"Stick that in your ADSL pipe and phone it"

Being the UC product manager I am lucky enough to be firnished with a few more devices than others in MS, this means I can sometimes take some of them home where normally they would be expected to stay in the office.

One such device is the Tanjay which I have temporarily (ahem) taken home and plugged into my home network. Now to set the scene, its probably worth giving you a tour of the jounrey it takes to get out onto the internet

That hub then plugs into a Develo Homeplug, which connects to upstairs using electrical wiring in the house (how cool is that!?)

The other end of the homeplug connects into a router

And finally the router connects out to the internet at 1.2mbps down and 376kbps up (according to www.speedtest.net)

Now it goes without saying that there is no QoS on any of that connection and so when I phoned Gary Bellfield (Tayside Fire and Rescue) who is also using OCS, I was interested to see how it coped, especially as my wife was using her PC in the background.

The result was it worked, simple as that !, I will leave it for Gary to comment from his side of things if he wants to but from my end the call was clear and was pretty much the same experience as the one I have in the office. If I remember correctly Gary was also at home(?) so worth taking that into consideration.

Whoever in Redmond worked on the RTCAudio codec needs a big pat on the back and if I had a big enough house to have study it would certainly be a permanent fixture in my home office.

Anyone else out there using OCS at home? What's the most 'interesting' connection you have had so far where you have used OCS to make a call and its been successfull?

It looks like a typical group chat session, but what makes it interesting is everything you can’t see from a simple screenshot. This OCS 2007 session started as a two person "Hey, is this working?" voice chat that blossomed into a full blown eight

Hey, it would be interesting to repeat the phone test while doing the speed test, or downloading a large file. This is usually cracking the nut… data traffic filling your pipe with large IP packets. Having a smaller upstream bandwith, your peer will probably suffer first :-).

RTA on its own can’t enforce QoS, and it will have to trade off delay (latency) vs speech quality (packet loss, garbled voice…) while trying to mitigate the factors of the imperfect network.

Let us know when you get a chance to repeat your test under forced conditions.

I just received my updated TanJay/PolyCom phone today. I took it home, plugged it into router and authenticated back to the office. It worked flawlessly! I have been using both the TanJay and PolyCom speaker phone for a few months now making outbound phone calls to people over the PSTN and it works great; oh yeah SIP to SIP works too.